Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a
copier and Iggy Pop's music in luxury cruise advertisements,
Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been
co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary
neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use
for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic,
being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like
everybody else. Through a consideration of the shift in dominant
modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant
"disciplinary" mode of power to a "biopolitical" mode, Nealon
argues that the modes of musical "resistance" need to be completely
rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or
meaning—saying "no" to the mainstream—is no longer primarily where
we might look for music to function against the grain. Rather, it
is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical
subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3
listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on
the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere)
that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the
"attention capitalism" that has come to organize neoliberalism in
the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final
confrontation between "keepin' it real" and "sellin' out."